Vox Tablet

Harvey Kurtzman was one of the most important comic-book artists of all time. R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and the creators of Saturday Night Live and Monty Python are all in his debt. In a new gloriously comics-filled biography called The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, authors Paul Buhle and Denis Kitchen go deep inside Kurtzman’s life and art. Paul Buhle spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Kurtzman’s secular Jewish upbringing in the Bronx, his success at MAD, and his failures later in life. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Eve Sicular is the founder of and drummer for the bands Metropolitan Klezmer and Isle of Klezbos, but her new work offers much more than traditional music. It’s called J. Edgar Klezmer – Songs from My Grandmother’s FBI Files. In the show, Eve combines archival materials, spoken word, and original songs from a variety of genres to explore the life of her paternal grandmother, Adele Sicular, who was a psychiatrist and activist in New York City. J. Edgar Klezmer will be performed in New York City on June 4th at the Manhattan JCC.

In the 1940s, Isaac Rosenfeld was a rising star in literary circles, recognized as a sharp, deep, and original thinker. His admirers included Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Diana Trilling, and other luminaries. Many people considered him to be more promising than his childhood friend Saul Bellow. But while Bellow went on to great success, Rosenfeld slipped behind. His writing life, marked by struggle, doubt, and carnal distractions, was cut short in 1956, when he died of a heart attack. He was 38 years old. How to make sense of the success, and failure, of this writer is the focus of Steven Zipperstein’s new biography, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, out now from Yale University Press. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, talks to Nextbook about the complicated life and work of this all but forgotten literary figure.

Like all modern Jewish art forms, Jewish pop music is often an attempt to recast material, to translate certain stories for new audiences so they aren’t lost. This can be a burden, or it can be a catalyst to explore identity, to experience spirituality, to exorcise nostalgia from the songs that have run through our minds since childhood. And like all pop music, contemporary Jewish pop must struggle to negotiate a delicate balance between originality and a perceptible thread of its influences. It has to maintain youthfulness while grappling with songs we associate with our parents—for many, traditional Jewish music feels so inherently tied to family that it can be a challenge for those in between childhood and parenthood to relate to it. Two new bands are innovating in these directions—albeit from different ends of young adulthood: 32-year-old David Griffin’s indie-rock outfit Hebrew School, and Zeda’s Beat Box, a band consisting of an adult and four teenagers. Hebrew School Hebrew School, which is funded by a Six Points Fellowship, was founded in New York City in 2007. Its first album is set to be released this March or April. According to its Web site, the band is going for “an innovative use of the genres of Indie rock and experimental music to mitigate, through recording and performance, the disaffection of Jewish life in a large urban center.” In case the language didn’t tip you off, Griffin identifies with the eye-rollers in the back of the Sunday school classroom, the kids who were bored by what they saw as a burdensome and irrelevant tacking-on of superficial Jewishness to otherwise secular lives, or considered themselves “too cool” for religious and cultural engagement, but, in adulthood, find themselves craving some sort of reconciliation. “I joke that this is a therapy process for me, working the songs through my head,” says Griffin. While some of Griffin’s lo-fi, multi-instrumental songs are covers of traditional favorites, others are originals. In the former category, his “Adon Olam” is completely deconstructed, full of hoots and warbles, drum rolls and noise. It’s still somehow pretty, and performing live, the band seems to enjoy it with the particular abandon that accompanies the destruction of childhood sacred cows; in this case, the target is particularly apt, as “Adon Olam” is known to be musically mutable. “At my bar mitzvah I sang it to the tune of ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,’” says Griffin. Hebrew School’s rendition is an attempt to subvert the general wisdom that the song can be sung to a variety of tunes, he says, “a way to prove the point that it couldn’t work with any melody.” In fact, though, by going so far out in its rendition, the band almost comes back around to something that might be described as a “classic” experimental piece, and as such, just another way to perform “Adon Olam” in any genre. David Griffin Among Griffin’s original compositions, there are gestures, overt and hidden, toward a kind of inescapable Jewishness. One song, “The Gravlax,” puts lyrics like, “I’m not in it for the JCC…I’m not in it for being a Jew, just in it for the gravlax” to an indie pop beat. “People commented that it sounds just like a rock song you might hear in some jukebox in Brooklyn,” Griffin says, “but then if you step in, there’s this strange other element.” But it’s hard to tell where intriguing uncanniness ends and novelty for its own sake begins. Honestly, any mention of smoked fish by a band called Hebrew School seems pretty conspicuous. “Ancillary Devices” drops a hint obscure enough that it feels like a secret treat to pick out—the first notes are from “Adir Hu,” a tune from the Passover seder. The song’s lyrics are a bit literal, but their subject—deliberate methods Griffin uses to spark his creativity (“like the current tack of only writing on two-thirds/ to 75% of a [...]

David Sax at Ben’s Best Pastrami, chopped liver, tongue—these are staples of the traditional Jewish delicatessen, an institution beloved by journalist David Sax. David writes Save the Deli, a blog which chronicles the life and death of delis around the world. He is also writing a book of the same name which will be published later this year by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Nextbook asked David to lunch at Ben’s Best, a deli in Rego Park, Queens, where we talked about his favorite dishes, the history of the Jewish delicatessen, and why so many latkes miss the mark.

Yotam Haber and others at the world premiere of death will come and she will have your eyes at the Villa Aurelia in Rome, 2008 Thirty years before the common era—a century before the destruction of the Second Temple—some Jews left Jerusalem for Rome. There, they established a community whose cantors chanted Torah in the tradition they brought with them from the land of ancient Israel. It was an insular community and over subsequent generations, that insularity helped preserve the community’s distinctiveness. Over the ensuing centuries, the Roman cantorial style remained relatively unchanged, impervious to the flourishes and innovations of newer traditions that arose in the Sephardic and Ashkenazic worlds. Fast forward two-plus millennia, to the year 2007. That’s when New York-based composer Yotam Haber went to Italy and discovered in some archives dusty old recordings of Roman cantors chanting the Torah in the age-old local style. The recordings were made more than 50 years ago by an ethnomusicologist named Leo Levi. So taken was Haber with the unadulterated singing of the Roman cantors, that he decided to use the recordings, along with verses from the Book of Lamentations and poetry by Jorie Graham, in a song cycle of his own, called death will come and she shall have your eyes. He speaks with Nextbook about his own composition, about what makes Roman liturgy unique, and about his plans for the future. Listen to “Cum Nimis Absurdum, the first movement of death will come and she shall have your eyes Listen to “Bereshit the fourth movement of death will come and she shall have your eyes

“A well dressed woman nowadays is as fluffy as a downy bird fresh from the nest.” So read a line in a magazine nearly 100 years ago, when ostrich feathers represented the height of chic (and fashion copy had a long way to go). For decades, women from Berlin to San Francisco wore hats and boas festooned with long, lush plumes harvested and exported from many regions of Africa—its southern tip, its Atlantic coast, and its northernmost reaches. The United States alone imported five million dollars’ worth of ostrich feathers in 1912, the height of the market. Two years later everything changed. In 1914, the industry that had boomed went bust, leaving everyone, from the immigrant girls who processed the feathers to the importers who bought them in bulk, jobless. Many of those people were Jews. As Sarah Abrevaya Stein argues in her book Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce, Jews were key players in this industry at every level. She speaks with Nextbook about how and why they came to dominate this business, the economic and political factors that led to its irreversible decline, and the difficulties in making generalizations about Jews in commerce. And in case you’re wondering, the answer to the question that stumps Stein in the podcast is: “Between 30 and 70 years.” Photo: Mrs. Harry K. Thaw, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

Essen, the title of the latest album by Paul Shapiro, means “to eat” in both German and Yiddish. And as the saxophonist, clarinetist and singer recently explained in a lexicographical aside from the stage of the Cornelia Street Café in lower Manhattan, it applies specifically to people. The word “fressen,” on the other hand, applies to animals. In German, using the word “fressen in connection with a person is considered vulgar or derogatory (they have an old saying, “Tiere fressen, Mensche essen””animals feed, humans eat). In Yiddish, however, it denotes nothing more than enthusiastic overeating. Shapiro knows something about both essing and fressing. This, after all, is a guy who is known around his own house as Chicken Man. “Put a piece of chicken in front of me, and my wife starts to get sweaty if there are guests around,” Shapiro told me a couple of weeks after the show. “I sort of lose touch with reality, and before you know it, it’s all over the place. There isn’t much left on my plate except for some half-eaten bones. If there’s not enough napkins around, it can get very, very dangerous.” And not just for poultry. “I’m a great lover of food,” he says. “I’ve got a pretty wide palate, and I eat all kinds of ethnic foods.” But Shapiro isn’t just a culinary gourmand; he’s a musical one, too. He’s even written a tune titled “Different Flavors” (“I like different flavors, yes I do…”) to express his love of variety in all things consumable, from soups to songs. As a member of the Microscopic Septet in the 1980s and early 1990s, Shapiro was part of a small but vibrant community of jazz musicians who refused to submit to the narrow, neoconservative ethos of the day, and chose instead to celebrate the entire tradition, from early swing to the avant-garde. You can hear that joyous open-mindedness in all of Shapiro’s subsequent work, including his two previous albums for John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Midnight Minyan and It’s in the Twilight, which subject traditional synagogue melodies to a variety of treatments, from rhythm and blues to modal jazz. Paul Shapiro Band Shapiro’s growing interest in Jewish music eventually led him to a pocket of repertoire from the 1930s and 1940s that occupies a fascinating middle ground between big band swing, Yiddish pop and early R&B. For the past several years, he has been presenting these finds, many of which take food as their theme, at Cornelia Street as part of his Ribs and Brisket Revue. There are klezmer-inflected melodies like Benny Goodman’s “My Little Cousin” (based on the Yiddish tune, “Di Grine Kuzine”), and jivey, bluesy numbers like Henry Nemo’s “A Bee Gezindt,” which was sung by both Cab Calloway and Mildred Bailey”neither of whom, presumably, could resist a lyric that rhymes “Miller” with “schmiller”; Borscht Belt material like “Tsouris,” a shtick-laden Yinglish routine originated by the Barton Brothers, and the food-obsessed title track, a Billy Hodes bit that was later reworked by Lee Tully (né Kalman Naftuli), and which Shapiro tracked down among the 78-rpm records in the YIVO archives; and a couple of tunes by the late, great hipster Slim Gaillard: the frenetic “Matzoh Balls” and “Dunkin’ Bagels”, which Shapiro reworks as ultra-groovy new jack swing. Many of these pieces illuminate the game of give-and-take that Jewish and African-American artists have played for generations, including “Utt-Da-Zay,” a Cab Calloway vehicle from 1938, which features mock cantorial gibberish by Revue singer Babi Floyd; and singer Cilla Owens’ earthy cover of blues singer Sophie Tucker’s Yiddishized cover of Jane Green’s “Mama Goes Where Papa Goes,” dating to 1923. “You listen to it and it’s very much a bluesy version, ’cause Sophie was really bluesy,” Shapiro says of Tucker’s rendition, which he also found at YIVO. “And yet it’s in Yiddish.” The [...]

When I first got into Judaism (read, betrayed my secular family and Conservative synagogue and became a religious zealot) I was convinced that Jewish culture was never going to replace secular culture in my life. During some of my first Shabboses as an observant Jew, I went to They Might Be Giants and Fugazi concerts, buying my ticket beforehand and manufacturing excuses, if only because, well, the Miami Boys’ Choir was next to impossible to slam-dance to, and I’d be damned if I was going to listen to any one-man synthesizer band just because we have a God in common. As it turned out, the first Jewish band that I really paid attention to, a hard-jazz trio called Satlah, would be my prophets. I was booked to open for them doing spoken word, and as soon as I saw the front man, a trumpeter named Danny Zamir, wearing a white shirt and black slacks, the total Typical Yeshiva Guy look—I freaked, convinced his music would sound cheesy and Fiddler on the Roof-derived. Zamir had sworn off secular music, but the music he was making turned out to be radical, mindblowingly acidic, and full of punk-rock fervor—and it consisted entirely of traditional Jewish songs. Although I haven’t sworn off secular music, ever since that first night seeing Satlah, I no longer hold a prejudice against Jewish music. I went on to find deliverance in the form of Socalled, a Jewish musical historian who is also a hip-hop remix wizard; and Juez, the klezmer-jazz-garage punk band. I have also picked up some guilty pleasures from mainstream Jewish music: Moshav, who write damn good songs even if they are embraced by yeshiva girls and Phish fans; and Smadar, who might sound closer to Barbra Streisand than They Might Be Giants, but could also be Amy Winehouse in Yemenite diva dress. These discoveries may represent the only welcome result of Jewish hipsterification: bringing inventive and iconoclastic Jewish artists to the spotlight. At heart, I’m still a punk-rock kid. I shop at independent record stores, I buy local produce, and I believe in the power of the local scene. And that’s how I see Jewish music: even when the bands are geographically disparate, something unites them. Maybe it’s that (maybe-outdated) idea of being Chosen; maybe it’s just my own taste. Either way, think of these as field notes from an emerging scene, a musical anthropology in action. * * * I have never been the biggest fan of Balkan Beat Box, JDub’s all-star international dance-music collective. Live, they’re a surge of energy and manic fun, but their albums feel DJ-driven and inorganic, too beat-centric and devoid of actual songs for me. Tomer Yosef Enter Tomer Yosef, BBB’s MC, who just released his solo debut, Laughing Underground, on JDub Records. The record takes Balkan’s culture-jamming, dance-music, party-on-the-fly aesthetic and highlights the best parts of it: it’s catchy, quirky, and laced with pure pop sensibilities. Hebrew hip-hop hits you from one direction. Arabic nigguns come flying from another. It doesn’t sound like a Balkan Beat Box album; it sounds like half a dozen albums. What JDub doesn’t want you to know: Laughing was recorded back in 2004. Why it doesn’t matter: The 14-track album is fast-moving, manic, pulling influences from reggae, ska, hip-hop and even the ABBA songbook to make a good-natured party record that sounds like a greatest-hits mixtape for an irresistibly catchy band. “Don’t Fly” is a great reggae song to play for people who don’t like reggae, but, for the truly selective, “Underground” is exactly what James Brown’s band would sound like if it was fronted by M.I.A. after inhaling helium. Listen to “Don’t Fly” by Tomer Yosef Listen to “Underground” by Tomer Yosef Kosha Dillz and C-Rayz Walz Last week, the suddenly-ubiquitous Kosha Dillz released his first full-length album, a team-up with C-Rayz Walz called Freestyle Vs. Written. Dillz, an Israeli-raised yeshiva dropout, was [...]

Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles Nearly twenty years ago, musicians Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles formed Elysian Fields—a rock group whose noir-infused songs are utterly seductive and hypnotic. Elysian Fields is still going strong, but in 2001 Oren and Jennifer took on a new project—digging up old melodies and lyrics from the Sephardic world of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and making them their own. The project is called La Mar Enfortuna (“The Unfortunate Sea”). Collaborating with jazz and classical Middle Eastern musicians, they’ve put out two records on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, a self-titled debut album in 2001 and Conviviencia last year. Oren Bloedow spoke to Nextbook about this musical adventure.

Yona Sabar studying in New Haven, winter 1967 For journalist Ariel Sabar, Aramaic has always been more than a linguistic relic used in reciting the Kaddish or Kol Nidre. Sabar’s father, Yona, grew up speaking Aramaic in an isolated Kurdish-Jewish enclave in northern Iraq. Yona moved to Israel in 1951, just after his bar mitzvah, an underprivileged refugee in a new country full of them. A disciplined and determined young man, Yona went to university and then graduate school, before becoming a professor of Near Eastern languages at UCLA. In Los Angeles, with his accent and old Chevette, Yona was completely different from the fathers of Ariel’s friends, and as a teenager Ariel rebelled against what he saw as Yona’s bumpkin ways. But when Ariel became a father himself, he decided to learn more about Yona’s unlikely journey from the mountains of Kurdistan to the leafy streets of Los Angeles. Ariel Sabar spoke with Nextbook about his new book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin, 2008), in which he weaves together Yona’s story with the larger history of Kurdish Jews. Photo courtesy of Ariel Sabar.

A few weeks ago, finalists were announced for this year’s Man Booker Prize, which honors the best novel by a British Commonwealth or Irish writer. The thirteen authors on the longlist include Salman Rushdie, art critic John Berger, and Joseph O’Neil, whose novel Netherland has received a lot of attention in the United States. Also on the list is an author who is not as well known here, but who should be: Linda Grant. Grant’s new novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, tells the story of Vivien, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants who hide their Jewishness—and other details of their past—from her and the rest of the world. As an adult, Vivien forges a friendship with an estranged, criminal uncle in order to gain access to the secrets her parents have kept from her. The Guardian calls the book “fluid and addictive.” Our London-based reporter Hugh Levinson was equally enthralled. In an interview with Levinson from her home in north London, Grant talks about why suffering does not make one noble, keeping family secrets rarely works, and shopping is a worthy pastime. Photos: Judah Passow.

Cory Kahaney As a Jewish woman comedian, Cory Kahaney knows she’s in good company—think Roseanne Barr, Sandra Bernhard, Gilda Radner, Jackie Hoffman, Sarah Silverman. But it was a revelation when, a few years ago, she discovered the work of Jean Carroll, a master of deadpan wisecracks, and Totie Fields, a zaftig entertainer who expertly ridiculed social norms. They were among a handful of feisty Jewish female stand-up comedians who appeared regularly on variety television and radio programs in the 1950s and 60s. Kahaney has since put together The J.A.P. Show, a stage production featuring stand-up routines from four contemporary Jewish women comics and archival tape of these “Queens of Comedy”—Carroll, Fields, Belle Barth, Betty Walker, and Pearl Williams. Here, she shares stories of their lives and work, along with some of the best bits from her show. Left: Totie Fields, as seen as co-host on The Mike Douglas Show in 1967. Shown with Mike Douglas. Right: Jean Carroll, circa 1953. Photos: Totie Fields, copyright © CBS/Photofest. Jean Carroll, Photofest.

Sixty years ago this week, the modern state of Israel was born. Since then, thousands, and ultimately millions, of Jews have adopted Hebrew as their primary language, despite the fact that their ancestors stopped speaking it nearly two thousand years earlier. Linguists say it is the most successful instance yet of a “dead” language’s revival. So how did Hebrew make the leap from ancient language to modern one? Who coined the terms that allow Israelis to speak about ice cream and skateboards? To answer these questions, Daniel Estrin visits the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem, the official arbiter of the language and its evolution. He meets with Keren Dubnov, charged with fielding all queries to the Academy’s Hebrew language hotline, and Gabriel Birnbaum, a senior researcher. With their help, he takes us back to modern Hebrew’s first, best advocate, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and forward to a time when, if the Academy has its way, Israelis will refer to their cellphone ringtone as “neimon.” Note: If you’ve got Hebrew language questions, or want to coin a Hebrew word, you can email the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Left: Gabriel Birnbaum, senior researcher at the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Right: Keren Dubnov, who replies to queries sent to the hotline at the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Photos: Daniel Estrin.

Congregation Beth El of Borough Park Brooklyn, New York, is a central location on the map of Jewish American migration. At its height, in the 1950s, the borough’s Jewish population numbered more than a million. Today, many thousands still make their home there, as evidenced by the vast number of synagogues thriving in neighborhoods as diverse as Park Slope (mostly reform and conservative) and Borough Park (mostly Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox). But Jews have long since abandoned other neighborhoods, leaving their synagogues to fend for themselves. Some have been converted into churches or commercial spaces, others simply leveled. Photographer Thomas Roma has spent years photographing Brooklyn’s houses of worship—of every denomination. But he found himself particularly drawn to synagogues for the stories the buildings seemed to tell about their neighborhood’s and congregation’s past, present, and future. He’s now collected his beautiful, large-scale, black-and-white photographs of these places in a book titled On Three Pillars: Torah, Worship, and the Practice of Loving Kindness. We visited with Roma to find out what draws him to these houses of worship—even those that, today, are nothing more than vacant lots. Photos copyright © 2007 Thomas Roma. All rights reserved